


1612 armageddon lane

by Violet_Kadzley



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Domestic, Collaboration, Crack, DEAD FIC, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse - Freeform, Gen, The American Dream, War and Famine Are Terrible Parents, We Are So Sorry For This, but not really
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-14
Updated: 2014-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-04 14:09:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1781863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Violet_Kadzley/pseuds/Violet_Kadzley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse are unceremoniously thrown into a domestic AU, and fail at being anything resembling a happy, wholesome family. The neighbors are concerned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1612 armageddon lane

**Author's Note:**

> Refined and cross-posted from my Tumblr. This is the result of a long and ridiculous conversation between me and a couple friends, who insisted that I put the things we'd come up with on the internet. I accidentally turned it into fic. Help me.

No one knows why Mr. Sable and Mrs. Zuigiber ever got married. They don't seem to like each other much, but they've been together longer than anyone can remember. The most plausible and decent reason anyone can come up with is "tax benefits."

They live in an excessively charming two-story house with a picket fence that used to be white, and a lawn that used to be perfect. There are two anthills on opposite sides of the yard. The colonies have been fighting nonstop for years.

Raven Sable is tall and trim and always wears a neat, black suit. He drives a nice car and devotes his weekdays to bringing home the bacon. (He's never liked that phrase.) No one in the neighborhood can recall ever seeing him eat, although some swear they saw him at least holding a hamburger at one of the community barbecues. Most people are starting to dismiss this as an urban legend.

Carmine Zuigiber is beautiful, terrifying, and never seen without her heels and pearls. She could choke a man to death with those pearls. She's almost done it to her husband five times. At least three of those times have had nothing to do with anger. She writes for the local newspaper, and when she attends meetings, they end with pens being repurposed into darts. Her competitive streak is highly contagious, and often dangerous.

At night, the neighbors always hear them screaming at each other about this, that, or the other thing. Their fights can last for hours, but at some point, it inevitably turns into a different kind of screaming altogether. This is the other reason they've been married so long, but no one ever says it out loud.

It's also the reason they have two children, although it's still a mystery as to how their oldest boy turned out so well-adjusted. (He moved out years ago and became a pediatrician. He's established his own practice, and writes home every so often. The postmen wear gloves when they're handling his letters.)

Their youngest boy's name is Snow, and he's been trouble ever since he was born. The hospital ended up incinerating or otherwise destroying all the equipment associated with his birth, and the entire maternity ward still smells faintly of toxic runoff. To this day, nobody knows how so much filth was allowed to accumulate in a supposedly sterile environment. After all, why would they suspect Snow? He was only a baby--a perfectly healthy baby, who giggled and cried and looked nothing like either of his parents.

The night they brought him home, he screamed and screamed, tears like oil slicks shining on his cheeks. No one slept.

Snow has an uncle named Mortimer. Neither of his parents know which side of the family he’s from--he just showed up on the front porch one day, looking ominous. He comes to visit when he hasn’t been invited, as well as during the holidays, and spends the day shouting and telling stories about all the people he’s seen die. The rest of the family would accuse him of making things up, if they thought he had the capacity to. Raven tells his son that he’d better be on his best behavior, even when his parents aren’t around to watch him, because Uncle Mortimer has eyes everywhere.

Of course, the boy wouldn’t be half as infamous if this tactic actually worked.

He’s learned a slew of curse words at an alarmingly young age, and enjoys saying them over and over and over, screaming colorful epithets at the top of his lungs. The only way Carmine can get him to stop is threatening to wash his mouth out with soap, and she never thinks about where he might have acquired his vocabulary.

For years, soap is his enemy. There is a monster in his closet made of soapy dish towels and hot water that he has recurring nightmares about. Bathing him is nothing but an exercise in futility and frustration, and it is always a two-person job. Just getting Snow into the bath is hard enough, because he squirms and kicks and slips out of their hands due to his perpetually greasy skin. Good smells and bubbles won’t make him stop shrieking and thrashing around in the water, and Raven and Carmine have to take turns holding him down and scrubbing him. Bath time lasts until all three of them are soaking wet and exhausted, and no matter how long they hold out, Snow never seems to get any cleaner. The towels have to be replaced.

One day he asks his father where the water goes, when it goes down the drain, and he is told that it goes down through the pipes and out to all the rivers and lakes and oceans, carrying all the dirt and muck into the farmlands and the mouths of fish. He is told that when the dirt and muck is inside the crops and the fish and the animals, it either goes inside people and makes them sick, or it doesn’t go inside people and makes them starve. He is not told about waste water treatment facilities.

Bathing gets a lot easier after that, and the closet monster goes away.

The towels will always be a lost cause, though.


End file.
